and an unfrequented, where you will not be ashamed and shocked and pained at heart to meet him.  Public men; much purchased and much praised men; rich and prosperous men; men high in talent and in place; and, indeed, all manner of men,—­walk abroad in this life softly.  Keep out of sight.  Take the side streets, and return home quickly.  You have no idea what an offence and what a snare you are to men you know, and to men you do not know.  If you are a public man, and if your name is much in men’s mouths, then the place you hold, the prices and the praises you get, do not give you one-tenth of the pleasure that they give a thousand other men pain.  Men you never heard of, and who would not know you if they met you, gnaw their hearts at the mere mention of your name.  Desire, then, to be unknown, as A Kempis says.  O teach me to love to be concealed, prays Jeremy Taylor.  Be ambitious to be unknown, Archbishop Leighton also instructs us.  And the great Fenelon took Ama nesciri for his crest and for his motto.  No wonder that an apostle cried out under the agony and the shame of ill-will.  No wonder that to kill it in the hearts of men the Son of God died under it on the cross.  And no wonder that all the gates of hell are wide open, day and night, for there is no day there, to receive home all those who will entertain ill-will in their hearts, and all the gates of heaven shut close to keep all ill-will for ever out.

3.  But, bad enough as all that is, the half has not been told, and never will be told in this life.  Butler has a passage that has long stumbled me, and it stumbles me the more the longer I live and study him and observe myself.  ‘Resentment,’ he says, in a very deep and a very serious passage—­’Resentment being out of the case, there is not, properly speaking, any such thing as direct ill-will in one man towards another.’  Well, great and undisputed as Butler’s authority is in all these matters, at the same time he would be the first to admit and to assert that a man’s inward experience transcends all outward authority.  Well, I am filled with shame and pain and repentance and remorse to have to say it, but my experience carries me right in the teeth of Butler’s doctrine.  I have dutifully tried to look at Butler’s inviting and exonerating doctrine in all possible lights, and from all possible points of view, in the anxious wish to prove it true; but I dare not say that I have succeeded.  The truth for thee—­my heart would continually call to me—­the best truth for thee is in me, and not in any Butler!  And when looking as closely as I can at my own heart in the matter of ill-will, what do I find—­and what will you find?  You will find that after subtracting all that can in any proper sense come under the head of real resentment, and in cases where real resentment is out of the question; in cases where you have received no injury, no neglect, no contempt, no anything whatsoever of that kind, you will find that there are men innocent of all that